And speaking of Ted Kaczynski, it looks like Jared Loughner scored Judy Clarke as a lawyer. To judge from that mug shot, she’s not going to have any trouble convincing a jury that her client is a nut job and ought to have his life spared. Certainly, compared to her travails trying to convince Kaczynski to go along with that strategy–he refused to be evaluated by a psychiatrist, his lawyers insisted, he fired them, and the judge then ordered him to undergo a psych eval in order to prove that he could defend himself: check and mate–this should be easy. I’m betting Loughner is a coward, although probably not a looser or faggot tool.

The Loughner thing, and the handwringing that followed, reminded me of something that happened a few months ago when I went to get the mail. I live in a tiny New England village, where everyone knows your name, sort of like Cheers, but without the stools and beer. The post office is appropriately small, and the postmistress, Charlene, knows way more than your name, which means that a lot of other people do too. Charlene’s the kind of woman who will, as she did the other day, leave her post to help chase down an escaped pig that is trotting down the middle of the road, and then return to sorting the mail and selling stamps without missing a beat. She’s cantankerous and cutting and good at what she does, always willing to advise on the most efficient way to mail a package, and I think she’s great.

Every day at 2, Charlene closes the service window for an hour to eat lunch and take a constitutional. ON the day in question, I stopped in to get my mail during her break. (Access to boxes is available during her lunch.) I was separating the junk from the mere crap when a guy walked in, someone whose name I didn’t know and had never seen before. He was holding some envelopes. He pushed on the door to the service area, but it was locked. He gave the door a kick and said, “Goddam federal gummint.” He said it to no one in particular, but, like Travis Bickle, I was the only one there. I felt my gorge rising. I tried to restrain myself, I really did, but the words were out of me before I knew it.

“What’s the Federal government got to do with it?” I said. He was two days unshaven, dressed in the local regalia–flannel shirt, saggy jeans, filthy gimme cap–and his eyes were rheumy, I imagined, from watching toomuch Fox News. “She works from 8 to 2 and then takes a lunch hour.”

“Yeah, probably takes a fucking  two-hour lunch.”

“Actually,  she’s on her way back right now,” I said, pointing out the window to where she was walking across the Town Green toward the post office, “and I’m sure she’ll be glad to help you.”

He left, unimpressed, swinging the front door with just a little more mustard than was necessary for the job, and chirped his tires as he pulled out.

Now, this upset me in two ways. The first, which has to do with Jared Loughner, is that it clued me in to just how much  anger is floating around out there, ready to land at the first opportunity. (I probably should have figured this out a long time ago, but not having cable and really disliking spending much time online has protected me.) Anger like that has to be primed to find its grounding, just like lightning has to be charged to be attracted to a lightning rod. So too with Loughner’s craziness. Maybe forty years ago he shoots up a draft office or robs an armored car on behalf of the SDS or the YIP (although I doubt it; all this equivalence between the left’s and right’s fiery rhetoric strikes me as just so much ecumenical posturing and overlooks the  reality that from the get-go conservatism has been the movement of reaction and oppression, but I digress), but now a gathering around a congresswoman is where it comes to ground. Don’t bother counting how many hours he spent watching Glenn Beck or listening to Michael Savage–it doesn’t matter. The rage is in the air, contagious like the flu, and I don’t have any doubt he contracted it and that it mixed badly with whatever other illnesses he has.

The other thing that got me is that I actually found myself defending the federal government. Talk about your signs of the apocalypse!

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